Future Waves: Digital Genres and the Virtual Office

On the last afternoon of the conference, over seventy people went to hear recent SLA Steven I. Goldspiel Memorial Research grant award recipients, Andrew Dillon and Claire R. McInerney, speak on the results from their respective studies, "Understanding Users in Digital Environments: A Longitudinal Study of Genre Information in Information Work" and "Providing Data, Information, and Knowledge to the Virtual Office."

Dillon, an expert in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Indiana University, talked about his use of student focus groups to test their expectations of digitized information. He explained that in psychological terms, genre is a natural occurrence that enables our cognitive system to form patterns for automatic recognition. An example of an information genre is a newspaper, which is traditionally paper-based. The paper-based conventions, when they are digitized, will hopefully provide some familiarity to the user in order to quickly leverage their comprehension levels. Using web forms of newspapers as a genre, Dillon decided to track users' abilities to search and recall specific items from what they had read. The data revealed that students took about six tries in order to remember which sections they clicked or what search words to use to obtain the information. Information professionals and vendors as providers and evaluators of content, will need to pay close attention to these user expectations in order to make their own web pages have a comfortable "look and feel." Dillon will continue the research and plans to present his final results at the SLA conference next year in Philadelphia.

Dillon's discourse dove-tailed nicely into McInerney's presentation, who is a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Her study, subsequently published as a book by SLA (see the SLA Virtual Bookstore at www.slapublishing.org), entailed how information professionals are providing information to remote knowledge workers, and the workers' satisfaction of information services provided. McInerney surveyed telecommuters, information center directors, information systems managers, and their supervisors within five large corporations. She first shared some interesting demographics about the remote users: average time in the company was 6.7 years; 35 percent listed their primary office location as the client site; 69 percent were men; and the mean distance from corporate offices was 381 miles. In addition, they tend to work an average of 48.12 hours per week; their extra "on the job" hours (especially for short timelines) were mainly between 5:00 p.m. and midnight. Survey participants reported that when they needed to make special information requests after non-traditional hours, service was not as readily available, although one corporate library routinely stays open until 9:00 p.m. and on Saturday to provide service worldwide. The turnaround time might be as long as one to two work days, and telecommuters do not wish to wait. To this attendee, the data illustrated the irony of the 24/7 service intranets are supposed to supply; while workers can work around the clock, problems with the intranet can only be addressed during the regular workday at headquarters. Consequently, McInerney noted that remote workers want more training on how to use information resources themselves. They received some training on how to access the system and retrieve information; however, 85 percent of those surveyed felt most of their training came by "word of mouth" from their colleagues. Many of these telecommuters were not aware that corporate library staff actually created the pages on their intranets; one remote user in particular thought t was developed solely by the IS department. Some corporate librarians are also taking leading roles in the company's knowledge management systems, but employees may not be aware of this changing role of the librarian. McInerney surmised that in collaboration with IS departments, information specialists may need to assert or have their work acknowledged on company intranets. Overall, most of the information services provided aligned with telecommuters' expectations. McInerney's presentation can be found at http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/M/Claire.R.Mc-Inerney-1/Sla99/.

The program piqued the interest of the attendees; it clearly demonstrated the need of special librarians to have studies that will support their work in the practical use of innovative technology and the provision of content. The Goldspiel award, which offers a stipend of up to $20,000, provides practitioners and academics an avenue to pursue research that can be applied broadly, yet meet the information priorities of SLA members. The deadline for 2000 proposal applications is February 28, 2000. More information about the Goldspiel award can be located at http://www.sla.org/research/goldfund/.

By Rebecca A. Smith. For more information, contact Ruth Arnold, Ph.D. Ruth@sla.org